Keep pretending that everything was okay.
Meanwhile, Connor just wanted to hold her, keep her for himself for just a little while longer. Not just to ease her hurt, but to ease his as well. To preserve the part of him that she brought out, celebrated. Loved.
Even if it was for just a few more hours.
Knowing there was no convincing her otherwise, however, and knowing she was doing this as much for him as she was herself, he got out of the car and went around to open her door.
She beat him to it though, and was waiting for him with a sweet, sexy kiss. He took it greedily, drew strength from it and sank into it at the same time. Deepened it into something not so sweet. And a whole lot more sexy.
Mid-kiss, he felt Abby slip something into the pocket of his pants.
What the—
He pinned her back up against the passenger door. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Abby looked stunned. Her fun, flirty smile faded completely and Connor mourned the loss. But he was too on edge now to shift it into reverse. “What are you trying to prove with this stunt?”
He yanked her panties out of his pocket and waved it at her furiously. “That you can be just like the other women I’ve slept with? Just another one-monther?” He slid his free hand up between her thighs, punishing them both. “Is this what you want? For me to treat you how I treated them?”
His fingers met her wet heat. God, how was he supposed to walk away from this tomorrow? From her?
The question was one he’d asked himself a hundred times over the past few weeks, but it wasn’t until tonight that he finally had an answer. It had killed him to see how broken down she’d looked after her encounter with Gabriella. Abby deserved better. She deserved to be happy. To be herself.
And if that meant letting her go, he would do it...because he’d gone and done the once unimaginable.
He’d fallen head over heels in love.
With a woman he couldn’t keep.
Emotions now in overdrive, he went from teasing her slick flesh to plunging his fingers into her core, torturing himself with the memory of how hard she’d come against his mouth last night, knowing that he’d never get the chance to taste her again.
Not after this.
When he felt the telltale pulsing of her inner walls, he pulled her hair back and clamped his mouth over the soft skin of her throat, marking her intentionally, wanting to have some small claim on her for however brief a time period. Something to stamp her as his.
Before he had to let her go.
* * * * *
ABBY WAS HORRIFIED at how her body was letting, begging Connor to keep going.
Keep telling her goodbye.
Keep punishing himself for having to do it.
Untamed and ruthless, his hands seemed to be everywhere all at once, using the secrets he’d learned about all her pleasures against her. For her. To drive her higher and higher…
His lips found hers just in time.
Saved the world from knowing that she was screaming her release in the middle of a crowded club parking lot.
Afterward, after she felt him cradling her to him gently, she drifted for a while. In and out on that lusty, floating bubble between repletion and awareness…until the boisterous laughter of a bunch of college kids walking past their car brought her crashing down to reality.
“I want to go home,” she whispered, unable to meet his eyes as she scrambled back inside the car. She shut herself off from him before he could say another word.
When he climbed into the driver’s seat and turned her way, she stared out the window, silently begging him all over again. For a different kind of release. Please, please. Just drive. Give me that much, Connor.
Finally, he did.
She closed her eyes to keep him from talking to her, to keep the tears from flowing. Because she knew what that was back there. That was Connor preparing to close the door on one of his one-month flings.
Preparing to close the door on her.
Turning away from him completely, she pretended to lean against her hand so she could wipe the tears away without him seeing.
“Abby, don’t cry. Please, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. What I did just now was unforgiveable. I don’t know what came over me. It’s just... You were being so different, doing exactly the kind of thing Gabriella used to do. And I hated seeing you do that, be that. For me.”
He gripped the steering wheel, pain streaking all through his voice. “But that’s no excuse. I should’ve stopped. You confided in me about your need for control and I all but stripped that from you back there.” He sounded so appalled, so disgusted with himself, that her heart went out to him.
What was left of it at least.
All at once, it became too much.
As they rolled to a stop outside of his house, she shoved open the door and just started running, fumbling for her keys as she raced for her car, the sound of his thudding footsteps following not far behind her.
His hand came slamming down on the door, preventing her quick getaway.
“Let me go, Connor. Please. I can’t do this. Don’t make me go through this.”
He tipped her chin up, forcing her to look up at him, to see his tortured expression, to see his blue eyes as gray as they’ve ever been. “I never wanted to hurt you, Abby.”
“Then let me go. Because staying here for any more of your goodbyes is going to hurt me.” She dropped her head to his chest. “You were right. Are you happy? It is more humane to walk out like a thief in the night without saying goodbye. Because there is no way that could hurt any more than what I’m feeling right now.”
Hands fisting against his shirt, she whispered in anguish, “It didn’t have to be like this. You didn’t have to start pushing me away. We could have had our one last beautiful night together and gone our separate ways. Didn’t you believe I could do it?”
“You weren’t the one I was worried about, sweetheart,” he said quietly. His arms wrapped around her and pulled her in close. “Even knowing that tomorrow is going to be the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do, even knowing that I was a total ass who doesn’t deserve to spend another minute with you, even knowing that you make me want to be the man that’ll do what’s right and just let you go…I can’t. Not yet. If all I get are these last few hours with you, I still want them. God help me but I do.”
She couldn’t keep hearing him torture himself like this, denying them both the fantasy of a painless goodbye.
“I want those last few hours with you too, Connor.”
* * * * *
AS HE KNOCKED on the door to his childhood home, it occurred to Connor that he didn’t have the vaguest idea if he still had his old key to the house.
There was a good chance he hadn’t even taken it with him when he’d moved away to college. An even better chance that he had taken it, and then thrown it out with the trash one day.
“Connor? To what do I owe pleasure this early in the morning?” A surprised Helen Sullivan pulled her front door open wide and flashed the bright, formal smile she reserved for only her welcome guests. Oh, and her sons.
Connor grimaced. “Can’t you just say hi to me like a normal mother for a change?”
She flinched.
Scrubbing a tired hand over his face, he tilted his head in apology. “I’m sorry mother, I’m just—”
“Can I help you with something?”
Her now utterly detached tone almost stopped him. But for some reason, he still managed to force out a quiet, “Actually…yes.”
That brought her gaze swinging back. “Really?” She looked so surprised that Connor racked his brain to try and recall the last time he’d asked her for something. Not a single memory came to mind.
“I want to know why you’re getting a divorce.”
Her face became a cold mask. “You’re the last person I thought would wonder over that. You know as well as I do that your father is a cheating bastard. A heartless bastard even withou
t the cheating part.”
He studied the first signs of life he’d seen in his mother in a long while. “How long have you known?”
“Since the beginning.” She shook her head bitterly. “Your father made certain that I knew from day one. He wanted me to know exactly who and what he was, who and what I had contracted my life to.”
For the first time ever, Connor felt something other than pity for his mother.
He felt empathy.
For a woman who hadn’t felt strong enough to leave a marriage that was anything but, despite every cruelty her husband threw her way.
“Did you know going in? He says you knew. That it was all a part of the agreement.”
She twisted her fingers around her now bare ring finger. When had she taken her wedding band off? How long ago did she file for divorce? What kind of son is callous enough not to know these answers?
“I knew it was all business for him, yes, but I never knew it would be a life sentence of pain for me. One filled with loneliness, humiliation. Apathy.”
“You didn’t have to be lonely,” he said quietly. “You had me; you had Brian.”
His mother reeled back as if he’d slapped her.
And in a way he had.
Because before this, they’d never spoken about her lack of a role in his and Brian’s lives.
“It wasn’t that easy!” she exclaimed, showing actual emotion for the first time in what felt like forever. “Yes, of course I wanted to be there for you and Brian, shower you both with the love your father never cared to give. You were both my perfect miracles, both so strong and good—everything I wasn’t. But living with your father, getting through each day in this sham of a life...I couldn’t survive it without turning off my emotions. All of them. Because I couldn’t just pick and choose certain parts of my heart to reserve for you and Brian, and not risk the rest of it to get slaughtered and stripped away by your father.”
She gripped his forearm almost desperately. “You remember, Connor. How he always used to make us feel like we weren’t worth caring about? It was a reminder he doled out daily, in a hundred heartless different ways. Even more so for me than for you two. And that was to keep me tied to him, a shell of a woman, too empty and broken to leave him.”
“So what’s changed?” he asked gently.
He had to know. Needed to know what could cause such a drastic change in a woman who’d made the choice every day for over thirty years to remain in her own personal hell.
“I fell in love.”
Connor blinked. That he had not been expecting.
Throughout his entire life, where his father had always been disparaging about love, his mother had seemed incapable of it, oblivious to it. And why wouldn’t she be? With a man like his father emptying her heart and making sure it remained that way.
After a long, cleansing breath, his mother began describing him then—her friend, the man who helped heal everything her husband had broken. The man who was waiting for her, apparently had been waiting for years.
For her to be free.
With each word, Connor watched his mother change before his very eyes. She became filled with joy, with life. Things that had never been there before, things she should’ve had a chance to have.
“You are in love.” It was a statement, a fact. Even he could see it.
“It suits you,” he added simply, not knowing what else to say.
Helen’s hands squeezed his forearm in a gentle, motherly gesture he hadn’t thought she’d know to do. “It suits you, too.”
His eyes shot up to hers.
She gave him a sad smile. “I know. It’s hard, isn’t it? I fought it, too. Most people think that falling in love, being in love is so easy. But that’s because most people have had it, or do have it. That’s what family is supposed to be for, right? Your never-ending source of love? But you and I, we didn’t have it. How in the world your brother found it despite everything is beyond me.”
Her breath hitched. “And I will never, ever forgive myself for the part I’ve played in adding to that void in both of your lives.”
“Mother, you did the best you could.”
“No. I didn’t. I should’ve been stronger. I should’ve loved you and Brian enough for two parents. Like how your brother is doing with Skylar. But I just…couldn’t.”
A sardonic grin tipped her mouth at the corner. “I tried explaining it to Henry once. I’d likened it to having a limb fall asleep on you. It’s compressed, drained, unaware…until that blood comes rushing in again. An unwelcome relief, or a welcome pain—depends how you look at it. Depends how long that limb has been cut off from circulation.”
With a shudder of remembrance, she whispered, “And it hurts, almost unbearably at first to feel all that coming back in, doesn’t it?”
Yes.
She nodded as if he’d answered aloud. “But it doesn’t stop there. Sure, your sleeping limb is all filled up and whole again, but it’s still not back to ‘normal.’ You still have to use it, get the feeling back, make it respond. So you get more doses of pain as you do, along with confusion, frustration, and at times, feelings that it’s not really worth it.”
“That’s what my heart went through; the pain process was long, and just as terrible as it was wonderful. It wasn’t until recently that it ended completely.” She put a hand on his cheek—yet another motherly gesture he committed to memory just in case it never came back again. “But your pain is still going on, isn’t it?”
Yes. A thousand times, yes.
“Who is she? Do I know her?”
That was an easier question to answer aloud. “You do, actually. It’s Abby. Abby Bartlett.”
Helen frowned, “Brian’s friend?”
He nodded.
Surprise and sympathy drifted over her features. “Oh, dear.”
Wow, for a woman just learning how to love again, she seemed remarkably insightful about all that he was struggling with.
Something that resembled a smile of motherly approval lit her face. “She is a very nice girl.”
He almost laughed then. “Yes, yes she is.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Sighing, he shook his head. “I don’t know. Any advice?”
She started chuckling delightedly at that—another first. “I am the last person to give you advice on anything dealing with love, Connor, and you know it.”
“Try anyway.” He had a feeling she’d be better at it than she thought.
After a long moment of consideration, she said, “I think…if you love her, you should let her love you back, help her love you back. Because let’s face it, we all need help with that.”
She bit her lip nervously. “Did that make any sense?”
He gave her a small grin. “That’s good advice. Great advice, really. Thank you.”
Her eyes widened, and then softened with emotion. The new laughlines forming there yet another marked change he was happy to see.
“Can I give you some advice now?” he ventured softly.
A startled, pleased look crossed her features. “Of course.”
He gazed at her for a beat, then smiled. “Let me and Brian call you ‘mom’ from now on.”
An instant rush of tears filled her eyes. “Do you think I deserve that?” she asked, her voice a hopeful whisper.
“I do. I think you deserve to let us love you. I think we deserve that, too.”
And now the tears were rolling down her cheeks. “I’d like that. Very much.”
He stood then and they proceeded to have the world’s most awkward parent-child hug ever. He shrugged. “We’ll get better at it.”
She chuckled—each one starting to sound more natural on her. “I’ll be sure to practice the hugging with Skylar.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. And if she’ll let me, I’m thinking of asking her to call me ‘grandma.’”
“Good. That suits you as well.” He glanced at his watch, knowing that even the best advice
had a window of time before its shelf life expired.
If he was going to follow through on the one his mother had provided, he needed to head out now. “I better get going.”
But before he did, he turned to his mother and asked, “This man, Henry, the one you’re in love with—is he a nice guy? Does he treat you well?”
Her smile was resplendent. “Yes. Very much so.”
“I’m glad. You deserve it.” He walked another few steps to his car and stopped again when another thought occurred to him, the ugliness of his father’s smug taunts from the other night echoing in his head. “Hey, who’s your legal counsel for the divorce? I want to be sure you have the best if they’re going up against our firm.”
“I actually just changed legal counsel since it was clear your father was going to pulverize the first one I’d retained.” She beamed. “My new attorney actually approached me to offer her help. Just last week, in fact.”
Really? That was unusual. “Is she any good? Because I’ll vet her for you, get you a better lawyer if you need.”
“Oh, she’s good alright. And you won’t need to vet her. You know her very well.”
He thought about that for a second before a slow smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. “Victoria?”
“Mmm hmm.”
Connor tipped his head back and laughed. Until his face hurt.
His father was going to get creamed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ABBY STRETCHED and rolled over in bed, sliding a hand over to the space beside her in reflex.
To the feeling of cold sheets.
So he left.
The tears came even though she’d told herself there wouldn’t be any this morning. Even though she’d told herself she had no regrets about giving her love to a man who hadn’t been able to give her his in return.
But no amount of logic and enlightened self-awareness could stop the pain, stop her from remembering every last detail of her final few hours with Connor.
A memory infinitely more painful in its perfection in the light of morning.
When the sound of the doorbell splintered through her house a moment later, she stilled, unable to move, unwilling to allow herself to get swept away by the fantasy that it would be Connor standing there on her doorstep on day thirty-two.
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